Storage In The Modern World and A Bit of Luck!

Some of you who've been reading my ramblings for a while might think that I have a storage obsession..... and I might. However, as anyone who has ever worked professionally in the IT world will tell you. That's actually the norm. We get paid to be prepared for and to recover from disasters of digital/ Binary proportions! See what I did there.....

Although I haven't worked in that world for over 10 years now, those principles are ingrained into my thinking. So, backing up and storage capacity is always on my mind. Right now, I'm in the process of taking my file server from 3 drives and 6 terabytes of HDD space to 4 drives and 8Tb. Some might consider that excessive, but really not so much when you consider that each of the 2 HTPCs have at least 500Gb as a scratch disk for temp storage and my desktop workstation has 4Tb by itself. .....and that's not counting any of their relatively small SSD boot drives. My rough rule of thumb is always to have at least as much as the combined capacities of all of our home computers' storage space in the file server that functions as backup AND media server.

What I had done in the past when using Microsoft's Windows Home Server was to simply trust in it's built-in redundancy schemes and call it a day. Well.....first of all, I've decided to move away from M$ now that WHS is a dead product and secondly decided to move to a more sophisticated (read secure) backup/redundancy set up. I think I've previously discussed migrating to NAS4Free before, so I'm not going to get into that here other than to say that in order to fully implement ZFS in an efficient manner I needed a 4th, 2Tb drive which will allow me to still have 6Tb of storage while losing only one drive's capacity to parity. I'll do a detailed "build-up/rebuild" post on the retooled Spectre when it's up. So, that's it? That's all I'm going to talk about this morning? A rebuild that hasn't even happeded yet?

Oh NO!!! Not by a long-shot! I'm going to talk about this: the Drobo Mini.

As you can see by this image, it's external storage.... with a twist! So; it has 4 bays, "so what"? Ah....let me start from the beginning and tell you a little story. 

Much like House with Wilson, many of my little ideas come from conversations with someone else. This last summer while my "location video" producing brother-in-law was here with his family, we discussed all things computer but as part of our little project to rip our DVD movies to digital files, he made mention of the fact that he had many external hard drives that he's collected and used them as necessary to store the many gigabytes of video files for his job. And that they are just kind of a necessity of his work-world. My question to him was that; "aren't they too slow" at USB 2.0 speed? His reply was, that it was pretty much the best he could do since Firewire was dead and that Thunderbolt was too difficult to find AND too expensive. Holy Interfaces Batman! That sounds like a challenge!

After consulting the Bat-Computer, I came across the Drobo line of storage. Yes; that which is most beloved of professional photographers and Mac-o-philes the world over.Of course, being of the "great unwashed" (PC users), I knew squat about them, but I did learn that they were pretty much "desktop" devices "Rats! Foiled by the Riddler"! Wait-a-minute; according to the bat-computer (that's Google to you, Bat-brain), there was a portable version that had hit the market in 2012.

Even better, it would allow you to intermix drives of all different capacities and makes, all while keeping a RAID scheme going giving.....TA-DA..... DATA REDUNDANCY!!! Oh; it gets better! There's a bay to take a mSATA SSD to allow caching acceleration, has BOTH USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt pass-through interfaces! All built into a 7" x 7" carbon-fiber reinforced "soft-touch" case with 2 whisper-quiet cooling fans and the smallest power brick-ette you ever saw. What's not to like?!? .......uhhh.....the $649 "List Price" (yikes)!!! Even the $399 Amazon price is pretty stiff, since remember; you have to provide your own drives!

Yeah; this is about what I felt like. For a tech-head like me, it's pretty much like the 16 year old who saw, fell in love with, then went to the Porsche car lot and looked at the price sticker. That price is all well and good for a professional who's writing this off as a business expense and is expecting to make money with it, for an "enthusiast" like me, it amounts to taking a Saturday afternoon and going by the Ferrari and Aston Martin dealers to look at the new models! 

Then, this happened! On occasion, you can still find really good deals on eBay! On Tuesday; St. Patrick's Day, just randomly surfing, I came across not just a Drobo Mini on eBay at a decent price (about $150 at the time), but it was fully populated with 4 Western Digital Blue 320Gb drives AND a Crucial M4 256Gb mSATA SSD! OK, so after I slowed down the heavy breathing, I decided to just keep an eye on it "just in case" it didn't go into an astronomical price-point that I couldn't justify. I got home yesterday afternoon and it was at about $190. At that point, I put my eBay strategy into play; which is deciding what it was worth to me, the max that I was going to be willing to pay for it and setting that as a limit. The amount was $250. Here's my rationale (such as it is for something I don't need to have): 

• At worse, I can sell it for at least that and get my money back since they sell for well over that amount on a regular basis. Know you product!
• The amount was reasonable given it's price at that point and since "that point" was within 45 minutes of the end time (which as an awkward weekday, before the evening so most folks are still at or trying to get home from work). 
• I could completely "walk away" without a blink of an eye since I really didn't "need it", and I can afford it right now since I'm doing a series of computer jobs that would pay for it.
• It was fully populated meaning that I can put it to use immediately without paying one more dime to buy any drives, although I have several sitting around right here. Further more, this would allow me to buy bigger ones (2Tb) over time and replace them and the Drobo is set up for me to replace them "on the fly" and restore the data on the ones that were in use since that's one of it's major selling point/features.
• And for some reason that guy put a 256Gb mSATA SSD in there as the "accelerator" which was completely unnecessary since the firmware sets a 64Gb cache limit! Again; do your research and know your product. Therefore, I at some future date can pick up a 64Gb drive for that purpose, and move the 256Gb one to my ThinkPad X1 with has an empty mSATA socket to up the storage capacity of that machine which I was planning on doing anyway! 
• In the final calculation, I had to figure about $70-90 on the plus side for the mSATA that I'll end up using in my ThinkPad. I could if I was so motivated, sell the 4, 320Gb drives for at least $15 each. That total would be around $130.

In the end, I bid $237, which was below my "cut-off", and won it at $225 (free shipping). If I deduct the other amounts which was the drives in it that I'm going to retask or replace, that will put the "bare" Drobo Mini at less than $100. At the end of the day; if I find that it's not useful or I just want to get my money back out of it, the transaction should turn a profit. Will I do that? Doubtful: I'm certain I'll be able to use it as a semi-portable storage solution that has built-in redundancy and is upgradeable. And in the today's digital world; is there's no such thing as having too much storage!?!

It's In With the New At the Frugal Propellerhead House

It was all "elbows and knees" at Case Del Propellerhead today. With the weather a mess, everything closed down and everyone elses computers out of the way, I started the new year off right! 

With the exception of our various laptops, every computer in the house got worked on. It ranged from the major overhaul of the server to add-in cards for the Blackbird workstation.

The work on the Blackbird was pretty simple, in that all I did was put in a PCI combo USB/Firewire card. You might ask.... what on earth would I need that for given now new that machine is.... at least to me. You won't believe this, but I'm all out of USB ports in the back! I've got so many devices, that I've used them up. Plus, I've still got some Firewire drive enclosures that I do a few things with now and then, so it's nice to be able to access them. I also switch out one of my Hauppauge tuner cards for another one, putting the more sophisticated HVR-2550 vs. 1800 that was in it since I'm much more likely to do video editing in it vs. the HTPC in the living room.

Then it was on to the Viking HTPC (bedroom) rebuild. I haven't discussed this, but in the middle of getting everyone elses' machines done, I picked up a a Silverstone SG08-Lite case. The original (non-lite) version was about a $150+ case, but it included a power supply that I neither needed nor wanted, so I was lucky. Plus it was less than $40 in "like new" condition. Earlier last week, I moved the entire contents of that machine from the Cooler Master Elite 130 case over this this much nicer case. Although almost everything fit nicely, there were a few items that required changes. The location of the drives forced me to switch out the SATA cables to 90 degree versions, and I have a slot loading optical drive coming; although I'm not sure why I'm bothering with that. Old school I guess. Otherwise, this machine is pretty much done and back online again.

 As much as I'd love for this post to be about me rebuilding my HTPC into one of the cool cases with the built-in screen, this is as good as it gets right now. I had previously pulled the old Gigabyte GA-EP45 motherboard out and removed all it's parts with the exception of the drives. Now came time for the other half of the upgrade. I had pulled the Asus E35M1-Pro board out of the Spectre server and now finally having it do the work it was designed to do. These board with their AMD "Brazos" APUs were really intended for media work in set-top boxes and the like, hence the no-fan heatsink set up. Unfortunately for the poor thing, I've had it running a file server up until this point! As we speak, it's running it's 4th round of updates and will soon be able to go back into the living room A/V rack.

All that was great, but the big ticket item of the day was the Spectre file server. Up until this point, it was a Windows Home Server 2011 (Vail) OS machine running 2, 2Tb Hitachi drives off of a HighPoint caching RAID controller. I've grown increasingly annoyed with the controller and now that the WHS has been orphaned....... Anyway, I've been considering moving over to one of the FreeBSD based OS's for some time now. Apparently, now is the time! So the machine got a Core2Duo generation Intel motherboard, along with an additional Intel NIC, 3, 2Tb Hitachi drives (soon to be 4), so I can get 75% efficiency while using ZFS RAID with parity. So "stay tuned". This is liable to be interesting!

Home Server Rebuild: Part 1 The Grunt Work

I've been avoiding this for a while now..... the grunt-work associated with a major change. But it had to happen sooner or later. As I've discussed before, there are a number of things about my WHS (Windows Home Server 2011) running file server that I've become unhappy with; although, much of it doesn't have anything to do with WHS itself, but rather the HighPoint Caching controller. 

After a lot of hours of watching YouTube I came to the following conclusions:

• I have to decide how I want to manage my storage.
• I have to decide what operating system I want to use.
• How safe do I want to be in terms of the files residing on the file server?
• How much money do I want to put into the server in terms of drives?
• How much time do I want to allocate to learning the OS?

Don't get me wrong: I love this stuff! But I have another full-time profession, a family that expects me to spend time with them. AND I do not have an unlimited amount of cash to expend on this solution.

So, here are my options. They start with reloading Windows Home Server 2011 which has the distinct advantage that I own it and have used it for close to a year now so there's a level of familiarity. My hardware is also set up for it, with a 160Gb SSD for the OS to live on, and a Highpoint caching controller that I know works with it. The downside is that I'm not very happy with how it's working and will have to expend an unknown amount of time figuring out how to make it work better..... if that's possible. Furthermore, it's a product that's been "orphaned" by Microsoft, so this is the "end of the trail" for it.

An obvious alternative is FreeNAS. It's well-known and quite popular today. It has that always favorable attribute of being a free product. As such is supported by the "open-source" community. It and it's off-shoot, NAS4Free (more on this later), have the advantage of having a robust software RAID file system that doesn't require the use of an expensive (and often annoyingly difficult to use) hardware controller. Plus underlying technology that allows it to play nicely with various other systems ranging from Windows (CIFS), Linux (SMB) to AFP (Mac Networking). They can also handle standalone authentication or work with Active Directory, although that's not particularly relevant in my case.

 

And of course, you can't talk about FreeNAS without getting into NAS4Free which is ixSystems' attempt to do FreeNAS with a better web interface and plugin system. As it turns out, based on lots of research, it seems to be somewhat less "bleeding edge" than FreeNAS and thus easier for laymen like me to grasp. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of what exactly pushed me in this direction. Suffice to say that the cleaner and easier interface was a better fit for me. 

....But what about the various Linux distros? Although, I'm certain that these are great for full production environments with a professional well versed in running command-line, these aren't for me. I will say that I was suitably impressed with CentOS during my time with it, but I just don't see myself investing the time necessary to become fully comfortable with it's use. Plus; I don't need a full server. I just need something to serve files, so really a "roll-your-own" NAS with greater flexibility.

What got done today? I loaded the OTP (Old ThinkPad) mobile file server up with NAS4Free 32-bit v. 9.3.0.2.1190 with it. Got it up and running. Copied a ripped movie file to it and played it back off. It's a good start! So stay tuned as this project proceeds and I decide whether this is in fact the server OS for me.

"Leftovers" Tech

This is the ongoing battle that I fight at my desk/workbench. Quite often, as a result of these battles, I end up with "leftovers". I don't mean that meatloaf in the fridge, or the crumbs in the bottom of the chip bag. 

I mean things like this. I'm old-school, and guys like me who have built a computer with a 120Mb primary hard drive have a hard time throwing them out. As a result of about a year or two of computer work, I've accumulated 5 virtually identical Western Digital Caviar drives. Unfortunately, they are 160Gb each (too small for real storage, too big to throw out), AND IDE interface to boot! None of them have very many hours on them at all, so they are still good.

You might remember that I had 2 Cooler Master Centurion cases in my home setup not too long ago. The main machine was in a newer Centurion 590 and my "Client Rig" was an XP box in an old Centurion 5 case (depicted above). When M$ pulled the plug on XP support this last spring, so did I; thus ending the need for an XP box. Subsequently, I upgraded and rebuilt, moving on to an Ivy Bridge based machine that now lives in a Cosmos II. The Centurion 590 went to my former student who's in college now to replace the dilapidated case we built her computer in, which left the old Centurion 5..... sitting forlornly out in the garage. 

One day, I dragged that poor old case into the office and just sat looking at it. I didn't take long to come to the realization that it has a lot of drive bays (5 5.25", 5 3.5"). Hmmmmm...... Stack of hard drives....... Case with lots of drive bays........ A marriage made in scroungers' heaven! 

Subsequently, it was found that I also own another "leftover"; a Thermaltake TR2-430 power supply. This power supply not only has just about enough ummph to handle all those drives, but 6...... count-em 6...... old style molex connectors for just the IDE style drives that I have! 

Then you throw in a Gigabyte GA-G41M motherboard along with Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor, and 4Gb of G.Skill RAM that was already living in that case (from the XP box of course), I'm just about set! This MB has the added benefit of onboard video making 1 less card to buy and consume power.

Another client throw-away from last year held a Promise TX-2, Ultra 133 ATA controller card. This card has dual IDE controllers that will connect 4 drives. In combination with the onboard IDE controller of the G41M, I have the ability to connect 6 drives....... the 5 I already have, plus one more at some future date. Are there other things I can do to this "free" server?

Apparently, Cooler Master made one of those "bay racks" that takes 3, 5.25" drive bays and turns the space into a container for 4, 3.5" hard drives, complete with it's own cooling fan.... all for $23 including shipping! That will allow me to use 3 of the 5 bays up top that would otherwise  not hold anything! Should I buy anything else? Here's a list of possibilities: 

• Another NIC to speed up file transfers
• A hardware RAID card, just because that might be cool to play with
• Firewire/1394 card (if I don't have one somewhere) to give me that interface (I have a couple of Firewire external hard drives)
• A card reader for the 3.5" drive space that I don't have the cover for. A reader would cost about the same as buying the cover ($10-15)

Where does all this leave me? Without doing anything else: a file server with 800Gb of storage. I know that doesn't sound like very much when you can buy little portable HDD that are 1Tb a piece. However, this gives me a full-on server that I can do with what I want, plus a platform from which I can plug in all those misc. drives into. Which leaves me with one question left to answer!

What OS should I use? It would be easy to do Windows 7, but there's a virtual cornucopia of free products out there. These range from the various forms of Linux, to FreeNAS or NAS4Free as well as my old Windows Home Server V1, that's very friendly for using a pool of random drives. What to do? It's a nice problem to have when you don't have financial resources invested in it!